Promiscuous Tongues

This chapter pulls together a litany of sexualized speech acts, or vernaculars of brown maternal life-making. Framing sexuality as a promiscuous web of salaciousness, scenes, secrets, structures and speech acts, this chapter turn toward the queer, the abject, the promiscuity, and the erotic embedded in brown mothers' tongues. Offering dirty jokes, feminine folklore, and maternal speech acts, this chapter considers how language, for the brown immigrant mother, is her primary object, one through which she interprets, disassembles, disobeys, and refutes the attachments imposed by the material conditions of her life.